1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to data security, and more specifically relates to a self discovering adaptive security system and method for securing data in a data warehouse.
2. Related Art
Data warehousing applications remain a critical management tool for organizations. Such applications allow users the flexibility to view data about the organization using different views that provide important information about certain operations. For instance, a view may be defined that shows sales by region for a group of salespeople. Another view may show units sold by division over time. In a typical data warehousing application, views are defined to display data based on a set of dimensions, e.g., region, sales, salespeople, etc.
However, data warehousing applications tend to face the recurring question of data security and more specifically, how to manage and secure the various dimensions for different users, or groups of users, e.g., what departmental data is accessible to which users, what business sectors are off limits to all but the explicitly authorized users, etc. Users are granted or denied data access based on a set of end-user view definitions. Problems associated with implementing and managing end-user view definitions become particularly complex as new dimensions are added to the data warehouse and/or security requirements for the existing dimensions are changed.
In the current state of the art, whenever security changes are required, or new dimensions are added, the development team has to go back to the drawing board and enable new data security constraints and filters. Existing solutions typically call for extensive meetings between the stake holders every time there is a need for a change in data access restrictions, whether those changes call for an expansion or reduction in data security constraints or filters. Unfortunately, this approach is time consuming, costly and error prone. Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method that can more effectively manage end-user view definitions in a data warehousing application.